The background description provided herein is for the purpose of generally presenting the context of the disclosure. Work of the presently named inventors, to the extent it is described in this background section, as well as aspects of the description that may not otherwise qualify as prior art at the time of filing, are neither expressly nor impliedly admitted as prior art against the present disclosure.
Network devices such as network switches, routers, edge devices, and the like employ timing mechanisms in which time stamp data are appended to or otherwise associated with data packets received at and/or transmitted from the network device, and with data packets as the data packets (or data representing the data packets) move through the various processing blocks of the network device. However, different processing blocks operate in different clock domains, complicating the distribution throughout the network device of a single time standard. Additionally, there are instances in which logic—minimal or not—exists between the point at which a time stamp is desired and the time at which the time stamp is desired to be accurate.